Master's Programme in Human Computer Interaction and User Experience

Umeå University's Master's Programme in Human Computer Interaction and User Experience is a two-year, 120-credit degree taught in English at the Department of Informatics. It replaced the department's earlier Human-Computer Interaction and Social Media programme, so if you have seen that title in an older listing it is the same lineage under a broader and more employable name. A one-year, 60-credit Magister exit also exists.

The degree sits at the join between design and computing: interaction design and prototyping, user research methods and usability evaluation, service design, cognitive aspects of interface use, accessibility, data-driven UX and the ethics of persuasive design. The degree awarded is a Master of Science with Informatics as the main field and a specialisation in Human-Computer Interaction and User Experience. Umeå is an unusual place to study this — the city also hosts the Umeå Institute of Design, one of the most awarded industrial-design schools in the world, and the design culture spills across the campus.

Tuition for non-EU students is SEK 152,300 a year, SEK 304,600 across the degree, with a first instalment of SEK 76,150 due around 10 May before the August start, plus a SEK 900 application fee. That is roughly LKR 4.87 million a year. Umeå living costs are meaningfully below Stockholm's, which matters over two years, and the Swedish student residence permit carries no formal cap on working hours during study.

The entry bar tightened when the programme was renamed, and this is the thing to check first: Umeå now asks for at least 90 ECTS in Informatics, Computer Science, Information Systems, Cognitive Science or an equivalent field within a Bachelor's of at least 180 ECTS, where the predecessor programme asked for 60. Sri Lankan graduates in Information Systems, Computer Science, IT or a computing-heavy management-information-systems degree from UCSC, Moratuwa, SLIIT, IIT or NSBM are the natural fit — but the credit count is assessed line by line, so send full module descriptions.